DICT’s warning gave hackers their loudest victory yet

DECODED: TECH, TRUTH, AND THREATS

By Art Samaniego

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) wanted to protect the public. Instead, it became the unwitting PR arm of Anonymous, amplifying the very movement it sought to contain.

Days before the annual November 5 hacktivist movement, the DICT released an advisory warning of a possible “traffic-flood” or DDoS attack, complete with the date, the risk, and the likely impact.

What was meant to be a technical bulletin turned into a nationwide announcement for the hackers’ big day. The moment that advisory hit the airwaves, the government itself did what Anonymous had been trying to do for more than a decade, that is, to make the world listen.

For context, the November 5 campaign isn’t new. It’s been around since 2011, when Anonymous first designated November 5 as its global day of digital protest, inspired by the movie V for Vendetta and the rallying cry: “Remember, remember the 5th of November” For years, it’s been a mostly underground tradition, a mixture of symbolic defacements, small-scale digital protests, and online campaigns that rarely made it beyond tech forums or niche cybersecurity briefings.

Never before had it dominated headlines or made it to the front page of mainstream news.

The DICT’s advisory transformed a global hacker tradition into a national spectacle. Newsrooms jumped on it. Social media amplified it.

Then the President himself stepped in, acknowledging the potential threat and ordering all agencies to be on alert, a statement that instantly gave the protest legitimacy. What would have been a minor online disruption became a front-page story.

Then came Congress, eager to show it was doing something. Lawmakers seized the moment to push for the creation of a National Cybersecurity Agency (NCSA), supposedly to “centralize” cyber defense. What they really did was prove the hacktivists’ point that it takes public embarrassment for the government to act. Anonymous didn’t have to breach a database or take down a system.

The DICT and the Philippine government did all the heavy lifting, from generating attention to triggering policy discussions.

Let’s not sugarcoat it: Anonymous has one goal, and that is to be heard. And we just handed them that on a silver platter. The DICT gave them the stage. The President gave them the spotlight. And the lawmakers provided the megaphone.

What was supposed to be a cybersecurity warning turned into a full-blown media event that even the hacktivists couldn’t have orchestrated better.

As of this writing, the Philippines is the only country where a national agency mandated to protect cyberspace has publicly warned citizens of a specific November 5 cyberattack, explicitly naming the date and linking it to DDoS operations. In London in 2021, authorities also issued warnings, but they were about the physical Million Mask March protests, not cyberattacks. The focus there was on street unrest, not server outages. The UK treated it as a public safety concern. The Philippines, meanwhile, turned it into a national event.

That makes this year’s November 5 episode historic and embarrassing. Instead of quietly hardening networks and coordinating with cybersecurity teams behind the scenes, the DICT put the nation on alert and handed Anonymous the world’s biggest microphone. It wasn’t cyber defense, it was cyber amplification. In hacktivism, attention is oxygen, and visibility is victory. The DICT provided both.

Whoever is advising the DICT on this blunder should seriously reconsider their approach, or be replaced by professionals who understand the importance of cybersecurity strategy and public messaging. This wasn’t a minor oversight, it was a textbook example of how well-intentioned warnings can backfire, transforming what could have been a quiet, easily contained event into a viral victory for the very group the government sought to downplay.

As a cybersecurity analyst, the irony is painful. After more than a decade of November 5 hacker campaigns that barely made headlines, it took just one press release to make the front page. Anonymous didn’t need to hack anything this year. Without touching a single system, the DICT handed hackers what they rarely get, publicity, a platform, and something close to legitimacy.